Subtextual Homesick Alien
by Kleenexwoman
Summary: Up above, aliens hover, making home movies for the folks back home, of all these weird creatures who lock up their spirits, drill holes in themselves, and live for their secrets.


He wakes up with a throbbing headache. This is unusual in itself; his normal gantlet of morning torture is emotional in nature, starting with dull disappointment over waking up from a dream to cold apprehension of the fresh pains the day ahead will hold for him. Headaches are not normal, and for a moment he's worried that he has a brain tumor or that an alien slug has taken up residence in his spinal column (neither of these are probable, but to a boy with a hypochondriac mother and a collection of Robert Heinlein books, both options are equally possible and equally frightening).

Then he remembers the events of the previous night. The squealing, screaming sounds in his ear. The faceless alien being who commanded him in a stentorian voice to…

To take a girl to a dance. 

Before he allows himself to dwell on the implications of this absurd command, George glances at the clock he keeps by his bedside. It's already 9 AM; school started a half hour ago. This is not a concern for George; if there is one thing he has learned from watching countless cardboard UFOs descend on badly-camouflaged strings to throw rays of scratchy death at green-screened crowds, it is that when aliens attack, normal life is allowed to stop. School no longer matters.

George realizes that it is imperative that he decipher the meaning behind Darth Vader's command to him. Why would an alien particularly care if one socially inept seventeen-year-old in one tiny Northern California town went to one lousy school dance with one unattainable girl? Aliens are supposed to be concerned with more cosmic matters, like the preservation of the Galactic Union or the enslavement of the entire human race, and George is almost certain that the possibility of him getting to second base in the backseat of Lorraine's daddy's car has nothing to do with either of these lofty goals.

There's only one place where he will find an answer, and it's certainly not in his own frantic head. He's dressed and on his bike in a matter of minutes, heading to the public library to gather new meaning from what has been his only source of solace and refuge for the last seven years. The words of the wise men, the clever men, the men who can reach inside his head and arrange black print and white paper so that they make stories, pictures, emotions, flashes of color and fear sparking inside his brain. The men whose words are so valuable that they are _paid_ for them, paid to make up stories—a luxury and privilege that George hopes to someday attain.

The library is cool and dark, the only color coming from the flaming hair of Miss Watts, the assistant librarian who's young and pretty and smells like honey and always makes sure that George is the first one to know about the newest Damon Knight story collection. She's a little concerned that he's not in school, but he explains to her that he's been let out early to do some independent research, and he can tell that she doesn't believe him but she shrugs and says okay anyway and she even offers to let him use the microfiche machine if he needs it. 

He immediately gravitates towards the small Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror section, where all the books have a little yellow sticker of a crescent moon stuck to their spines, and spends a good half-hour weeding through the collection. Tolkien and Moorcock are old friends as well, but he's pretty sure that Tolkien never wrote about UFOs (unless elves are actually aliens, and he makes sure to write that idea down in his notebook). He debates adding a Lovecraft story collection to the pile, but then remembers "The Color Out Of Space" and also that aliens, like Cthulhu, can have tentacles.

George knows most of the stories in these books, and only has to skim them in order to remember what the aliens in each story were like and what they wanted. There is a dazzling multiplicity of forms and motives. Aliens can come to Earth in order to dispassionately monitor humans, to watch over them and protect them from blowing themselves up with nuclear bombs, to gather information for an Encyclopedia Galactica, to destroy the Earth and make humans their slaves, to found a new colony as a refuge from a dying homeworld, or (in some of the funnier stories) just to take a vacation. They can be giant robots, skinny green children with bulbous heads, things that look vaguely like ostriches or slugs or spiders, they can be indescribable abominations of nature or perfectly normal humans that just happen to be two inches tall or dress in silvery jumpsuits. In fact, the very scariest stories are the ones that have aliens that look like humans, that disguise themselves in a human skin and walk among Earthlings. You can't tell there's anything different about them unless you're watching very closely when they give themselves away.

That's what he focuses on now, on these hidden invaders, the secret ones who walk among humans. The people who aren't quite right_ (not that you are either)_, the people who don't quite fit in _(you don't)_, the people who come out of nowhere. Who land from the sky.

And that sparks a little connection in George's brain, and he doesn't know _why_ but he knows _who_ the alien is, knows which sweet, open, guileless face hides that horrific blank mask. He knows who landed a little less than a week ago, dropped into his life the same way he dropped out of that tree.

He chews on his pencil, gathering evidence. The Coast Guard—maybe that's the alien name for their first wave invasion or their surveillance spacecraft. Doc Brown—said he was his uncle. Another alien? Maybe. Or maybe the alien's hypnotized him. Maybe the old scientist invented something that worked too well, something that called to the alien and drew him down to Earth. George scribbles this idea down in his notebook, then rereads it and tears the page out. He can see the scene in his head, now he just has to find the right words to show it…

And he's lost in the story now, and by the time it's three-thirty and school is supposed to be getting out, he's forgotten all about the alien named Marty.


End file.
